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Keith and Dave: everybody on this board disagrees with everyone else about something. The point of this board is to provide news and discussion for a certain loose aggregation of radical political perspectives.

That discussion means people *should* disagree with each other, as well as provide ideas and facts that support a given position. As many of us, myself included, have shown uncountable times here, we're quite prepared to disagree and be disagreed with as long as it's done intelligently and respectfully.

Everybody believes in ideas that don't stand up and it is the job of political friends to test one another's ideas and so disabuse ourselves of the stuff that doesn't make sense.

I did not at any point criticise Geoffrey for having a different viewpoint, so your charge is an inflammatory insult.

My first reply to Geoffrey took him to task for what I understood his position to be.

He told me I'd partially misunderstood him, which I accepted and apologised for in a friendly manner. I ended with a (hopefully) humorous football analogy as to why official complaints against the police are almost always a waste of time.

(In a nutshell, the police investigate themselves most of the time, and the IPCC is too closely aligned with the police for the rare occasion when it does the work itself).

He replied saying that people who see the police behave unacceptably or unlawfully should make a complaint. This is not a refutation of what I'd said but a reiteration of a point I'd just rebutted, as if I hadn't responded at all.

So I gave a more detailed explanation of my position with more supporting evidence.

I don't see anywhere up to that point where I had been at all insulting or trying to shut down debate.

He replied with a sarcastic remark that he had understood my point, which means his reiteration had been trolling, so I said so.

I did criticise him for his contradictory position of posting as someone who hasn't understood what has been said yet claiming to have understood it, and for deflecting the blame for the trolling on to those who pick him up on it. I stand by that.

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

But...there seems to be a view here that he resorts to sarcasm and the opposites don't. I don't think any of us are blameless in this respect - I've certainly posted comments that I would later have watered down. Conversely, I rather wish I'd been more on the nose the other night.

But to get back to the issue in question - I'm rather at a loss at why everything in that article is taken at face value as if he's the new messiah. If an ex-Commissioner wrote an article in The Guardian would you really not question anything he had to say? And that blinkered attitude here rather pisses me off.

I questioned whether the authors background was suitable for the post in question, but the reply I got completely ignored that aspect by Grufty before things resorted to a catfight.

I also said "I don't think he can have it both ways when he says "these statistics disclose a complaints system that fails to identify or punish the minority who abuse their office, and it serves the decent majority ill."", etc. Again this part was ignored in the catfight!

I also felt that the author of that article contradicted himself. His remark that the public can't call on the IPCC but that "Police officers are regular visitors to the IPCC, and staff make frequent visits to police professional standards (complaints handling) departments to discuss cases" makes the whole thing sound rather sinister IMO, whereas the reality of it is that this would be the officers leading the investigation not the rank and file, or those subject of the complaint.

Later he says "I handled the West Midlands, which has the second largest police force in the country, yet the IPCC has no office in the region, employs virtually no one from there and, since I left, has no commissioner resident in the region" which surely reinforces what I'm saying.

I guess what I'm saying is that the article is one persons view and it sounds like he has an agenda.